Editors From The United States

"For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life."

"We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points."

"It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant."

"There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see — I think that is enough to say about them..."

"There are two modes of criticism. One which … crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drouth. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood."

"Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions."

"It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores."

"Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow."

"Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering-pot and pruning-knife."

"The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work."

"Women are the best helpers of one another. Let them think; let them act; till they know what they need. But if you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply-any. Let them be sea-captains if you will."

"Were the destiny of woman thus exactly marked out, did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent’s or guardian’s roof till she married, did marriage give her a sure home and a protector, were she never liable to be made a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment, and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement, we would still demand of her a far wider and more generous culture than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere."

"Imagine if a friend, or even a son or brother, told you, "Hey, guess what I did last night? I stole a car and then I stole a cop car, I shot at some cops (presumably family men), and resisted arrest every step of the way." My response would be: A) "I hope they beat your ass"; B) "Gee, did they beat your ass?"; C) "How come they didn't beat your ass?"; or D) "Come with me right now so I can take you down to the station so they can beat your ass." There is no E) none of the above."

"Goldberg was very touchy about the idea that he had been removed from the magazine. He wanted people to know that it was his idea to leave the National Review to fax out a newsletter from his basement (with no name and no money) along with Stephen Hayes. The Drag Queen Story Hour enthusiast David French even tweeted: "There's news. There's fake news. Then there's the absolute premium-grade BS I'm reading on MAGA Twitter and elsewhere claiming that Jonah Goldberg was pushed out of National Review. Completely, totally false." What made this so funny was that David French was himself removed from the magazine a few months later! Where did he go? Well, he went to work for Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes and their little newsletter of course. The three of them were now free to plummet into new depths of unpopularity together. The most intellectually bankrupt and vitriolic of the Never Trumpers had finally been thrown into the dustbin of history."

"So I had basically caught the editors of the National Review in bald-faced lies about taking money from Big Tech companies like Google to remain silent while those same Big Tech companies censored and de-platformed other conservatives. This was, of course, an unconscionable betrayal for The Flagship Conservative Magazine to commit against its own readers — but they did it anyway. Meanwhile, I was hearing from sources close to the National Review Board that the loss of donors and subscribers was so serious that drastic action would need to be taken. (The magazine had lost about half of its subscriber base in less than two years.) The board was also adamant that Jonah Goldberg and David French were the main culprits behind the astonishing collapse of the magazine's influence, and that they needed to go. Everybody wanted them off the masthead in order to survive."

"The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context. Conservatism is gratitude..."

"We “borrow” stuff from other cultures constantly, starting with Christianity itself. This is particularly true of America, which is why our menus read like the requested meal plans from a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. This profound lack of self-awareness manifests itself most acutely among progressives who wear their Europe-envy on their sleeves. Oh, they’re so much more civilized over there. Well, what civilization do you think “over there” is part of?"

"But the weird thing is that many of the people who are outraged by benign nationalism or the benign pan-nationalism that is pride in Western civilization take no umbrage when someone from Iran or China says they think their civilization is best. This of course is a manifestation of the ancient cult of identitarianism, which the best traditions of the West have battled internally at great cost for thousands of years. Saying Western civilization is great hurts the feelings of some people invested in some other source of identity. And it hurts the feelings of some Westerners because they think it’s a sign of enlightenment to get offended on other people’s behalf or to denigrate the society that gave them their soap box."

"[T]he immediate assumption that praise for, or pride in, Western civilization is a species of bigotry and racism is a perfect example of the sort of civilizational suicide I describe in my own book on the subject."

"One of the things I tell new parents is something that was told to me when my daughter still had that new-baby smell: “Prepare for long days but short years.” No statement more succinctly captures the exhaustion, excitement, and melancholy nostalgia that come with parenthood. I have no doubt whole books have not covered it more eloquently."

"The piece was opinion, the news was fact captured on film."

"Keeping Germany from acting too German (or at least too Prussian) is an important lesson of history."

"Look, I know very well there are many kinds of socialism. But wherever socialism has teeth, it veers closer to gangsterism because it depends on the use of arbitrary power, either by the state or, in essence, the mob. If you really want economic equality, you need to take money from people who earned it and give it to, or spend it on, people who didn’t. “Fighting income inequality” doesn’t change the fact that the state is using force based upon an aesthetic conceit about how society should look."

"[B]ending the system to the idea that the government in Washington should see the country as a bunch of competing racial and ethnic groups with no particular or meaningful attachment to place and community, whose only relationship to government is unmediated through state and local government, is precisely the sort of thinking that Arthur Schlesinger lamented... If it makes you sad that California doesn’t have more clout in the Senate, fine. But playing statistical games based on race and ethnicity is a pernicious way of approaching that problem."

"Everyone’s decrying tribalism, and yet the idea that we should rejigger the constitutional order to make sure that Asian Americans in California have the same “representation” in the Senate as Hispanics in, say, Texas or Rhode Island is profoundly tribal. Maybe Hispanics in Texas have different political interests than Hispanics in California? Maybe Hispanics — an incredibly diverse category of people — don’t vote based upon an abstract designation?"

"I understand that identity-politics arguments are supposed to trump everything else these days, but the idea that all Americans of Asian, black, and Hispanic heritage have homogeneous political interests and identities is both ridiculous and grotesque."

"The only society in which it is remotely possible for people to design their lives in the manner Marx fantasizes is one that is incredibly rich and incredibly free. We are nowhere near there yet, but it’s worth pointing out that if you plucked any laborer from another era and toured him or her around America today, they’d think that we were remarkably close."

"[S]ocialists are romantics in that they want to curate their lives entirely based on their own feelings."

"Some people work just to make the money to support the other things in their life that provide meaning, be it a family or a cause or a hobby that may seem silly to you or me but is central to their individual pursuit of happiness. Some people don’t work for money at all. Priests, stay-at-home parents, and volunteers in a thousand different institutions aren’t pursuing wealth; they are pursuing meaning through love and love through meaning."

"[W]ork is good. Work is virtuous and inculcates virtue. Work gives people a sense of meaning and of being needed. Obviously, not everyone feels such satisfaction in the job they have now, but that dissatisfaction is precisely the motivation people need to find the job that might provide it. That motivation inspires virtue, too."

"[T]here has never been a society in all of human history where the average person did not have to work. Sure, some crapulent prince could lay around all day and do nothing, but everyone else had to till the soil or pound the anvil or carry a spear."

"One of the great things about liberalism is that it allows for more paths for just that pursuit. In tribal society, there was little to no division of labor beyond what was rooted in age and sex. In feudal monarchies and modern totalitarianisms alike, there is division of labor, but it is imposed on people by rulers: “You will be a soldier.” “You will be a fry cook.” “You were born to be a slave or a serf.” In a free society, you have choice. It’s not perfect: You can’t choose to be a Marine if you do not meet the requirements, but you are free to try."

"[I]nstitutions and communities need to be able to exploit their comparative advantages. It’s not just that the Marine Corps demands more from its members than the Peace Corps; it’s that the Marines demand different things. For some people, being a Marine would be a kind of living Hell; for others it is a reason to live. That’s what the individual pursuit of happiness means."

"The modern doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism are a kind of homogenizing totalitarianism. Its acolytes want every institution to be filled with people who look different but think alike. What our society needs is not more “diversity” of this sort but more variety. Different communities and institutions need to be able live differently, because it is only with this kind of variety that a diverse people can find places where they all feel at home and where they can all find a kind of meaning that suits them as individuals."

"At the end of the day, happiness is derived from love — love for others and others’ love for you. When I say “love” I do not mean simply romantic love, though that is obviously one of the greatest wellsprings of true happiness. I mean the love one feels from friends, and the love for places and things that brings people together for shared purpose."

"[T]he U.N. is the best arena in the world for picking the right enemies."

"This is how we got here. It will get worse because there are no incentives to be better. It won’t end well either, but at least it will feel familiar."

"Judges are not typically expected to remain dispassionate when they’ve been accused of gang rape, nor should they be."

"Progressives have won so many policy battles by relying on activist courts to do things they could not achieve at the ballot box, they’ve come to see an activist Supreme Court as a birthright. As a result, the Court has been politicized far more than it should be."

"After the rise of socialism and the retreat of monarchical and clerical rule, liberalism became, in effect, the new conservatism in that it took on the mantle of the status quo."

"The sense of local community, the feeling of espirit de corps, the satisfaction one gets from belonging to a settled traditional or even tribal order, and the feeling of centeredness and place one gets in the family: These are all wonderful things. But they can, and often do, become poisonous, oppressive, and even tyrannical when the state tries to impose them on the entirety of society. When we try to make the macrocosm of society like the microcosm of the family or tribe, we destroy it every bit as much as when we try to make the microcosm operate according to the rules of the macrocosm."

"We can debate how much socialism there was in Hitler’s National Socialism. It is remarkable, however, that many of the people insisting that Norway or Sweden is obviously socialist even though they both are more free-market than Hitlerite Germany are aghast at the suggestion that the National Socialists were…socialists."

"As America’s Founders well understood, a society enjoying a multiplicity of institutions, interests, and intact communities (i.e., factions) is much more difficult to subjugate by a single central power, be it a king, a dictator, or a bureaucracy."

"[C]apitalism is as much to blame for the consolidation and homogenization of nations as champions of progressive central planning are, if not more so."

"[W]hat makes a libertarian in America a “right-winger” makes him a “liberal” in most of Europe."

"The major difference between the left and the right when it comes to any movement dedicated to overthrowing the free-market order—corporatist, authoritarian, etc.—is which groups will be the winners and which groups will be the losers. A left-wing system might empower labor leaders, government bureaucrats, progressive intellectuals, universities, certain minority groups, and one set of industries. A right-wing system might reward a different set of industries as well as traditional religious groups and their leaders, an ethnic majority, aristocrats, or perhaps rural interests. But both systems would be reactionary in the sense that they rejected the legacy of the Lockean revolution..."

"The problem is that the central government in a sprawling country of over 325 million can’t provide solidarity (without resorting to anti-democratic means)—only the institutions of civil society (faith, family, etc.) can fill the holes in our souls."

"Capitalism—at least as Sanders & Co. understand it—is not fulfilling. It doesn’t provide a sense of meaning and solidarity. It rewards—in their minds—the few and punishes the many. There must be a better, more humane way, in which we’re all in it together and sacrifice is shared. The word “social” comes from the Latin socii, meaning allies. People want to feel that they are allied with one another, fighting toward a common goal together for the good of the tribe, marching to the same drumbeats. This is innate in us. Our tribal brains crave social solidarity every bit as much as our palates crave foods that are sweet, fatty, or salty. We can train ourselves to resist the cravings or channel them toward productive ends. But very few of us can eliminate the craving itself."

"Millennials who supported Bernie Sanders almost certainly don’t care about the weedy specifics of his health-care plans. They do not want to live in a country with an economic system that could never have produced the iPhone or the Internet. What they want is a greater sense of social solidarity."

"Socialism as a thoroughgoing system had failed. But the central emotion behind it had not. And that emotion has only deepened..."